Frankenstein's Monster and Its Romantic Relatives: Problems
of Knowledge in English Romanticism

L. J. Swingle

Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 16 (Spring,
1973): 51-65.

{51} Mary Shelley's transformation of Gothic terror into a study in
problems of knowledge makes her novel Frankenstein an
important work of Romantic literature. Mary
Shelley presents Frankenstein's monster as an unknown quantity.
Significantly, it has no name: it is called conflicting things
in the course of the novel. Arguing with Frankenstein, the
monster calls itself simply a "creature'; according to its
tale, cottagers it once aided called it a 'good spirit."
Frankenstein himself calls it, among other things, "Abhorred
monster! fiend that thou art!"1 Whether the human mind can know
what the monster really is, most crucially, whether the monster
can be trusted or not, is placed in question in
Frankenstein, and, in exploring this, Mary Shelley
pursues one of the dominant concerns of English Romanticism, the
question of the human mind's ability to grasp the essential
natures of things.

I

One need not assume that Frankenstein's monster is the novel's
unjustly treated innocent victim and that we are supposed to
believe its claims. The error underlying such an assumption is
the familiar one of reading a literary work as an expression of
what one thinks one knows about its author's beliefs. The
monster expresses ideas that may appear to be Romantic doctrines
and, hence, Mary Shelley's doctrines. It insists to
Frankenstein, "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a
fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous" (p. 100); or, "My vices are the
children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will
necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal" (p. 147). In short, the monster
sounds like a popular biography's version of Rousseau or Godwin. Accordingly, a reader
may decide or merely take for granted that Mary Shelley is using
the monster to advance her doctrines. Thus one critic writes
that the monster's tale "might well be called 'The Education of
a Natural Man' (albeit an 'artificial' natural man), the
author's assumption being man's innate goodness and, voicing
Godwin and Shelley the
failure of existing institutions to sustain him"2

{52} The monster's assertions may or may not express doctrines
that Mary Shelley as an
individual believes, but this is incidental to her concern. In
Frankenstein she is using doctrines to examine the
barriers that exist between different centers of consciousness,
not using those consciousnesses as ventriloquists' dummies for
advancing doctrines. Thus she rejects an omniscient narrator in
favor of what approaches a series of interlocked dramatic
monologues, that is, a tale within a tale within still a third
tale; and she places familiar doctrines of her time in the mouth
of one dramatic character who uses them as an argument to gain
what he wants from another dramatic character, while the latter
insists that the former cannot be trusted.

The notion that the monster is advancing Mary Shelley's
doctrines for reader consumption leads to a distorted experience
of the novel because it commonly produces the corollary that,
since the monster speaks for the author, then whatever the
monster says must be true. Thus, for example, one reader tells
us (and others presuppose) that the monster is "essentially
benevolent."3 The only evidence for this is that
the monster says so.

One encounters other Curious slips in reading the novel that
have critical consequences. For example, one critic speaks of
the monster's suicide at the end of Frankenstein.4 But the
monster does not commit suicide. It says it intends to do so,
and then it disappears. The difference is of some critical
importance.

Had the monster committed suicide "on stage" before witnesses,
then this act would have tended to define its true nature. It
would have suggested that the monster did not have some fiendish
plan to destroy mankind; at least, it would have established
that here at the end the plan was laid aside. Further,
announcement followed by fulfillment of the intent to commit
suicide would have at least tended to suggest that one could
trust the monster's word; and this knowledge would reverberate
back through the novel, influencing our judgment about its
earlier assertions. This in turn would tend to invalidate
Frankenstein's rejection of the monster. But such clarifying of
distinctions between the true and the false is precisely what
Mary Shelley avoids in Frankenstein

All that the reader, Frankenstein, and Walton ever know of the
monster comes from two sources: first, evidence of the senses,
the monster's physical appearance, and those of its actions
witnessed by others or testified to by evidence corroborated by
others; and second, the monster's words. And the crucial
critical point is that the portraits of the monster derived from
these two sources conflict.

On the one hand, we have the fact that the monster is subject to
outbursts of terrible rage, the fact that it does kill people,
and the fact of its horrible {53} physical appearance,
especially the "ghastly grin" (p.
169) that so frightens Frankenstein and leads him to
feverishly destroy his work on the monster's mate. On the other
hand we have what the monster says, its insistence that all the
seeming negative evidence is misleading and that it is
essentially benevolent. It says it killed only out of misery
and frustration and that, granted its desires, it would cease to
kill. It says it helped some cottagers and that it made
unsuccessful attempts to be benevolent toward other human
beings. It says that its horrible appearance is not the
outward manifestation of a horrible inner nature and a fiendish
plan but merely a function of man's peculiarly human means of
sensing: "the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our
union" (p. 145). And to
support all this, all it can or does do is swear elaborate oaths
that it speaks truly: "I swear to you, by the earth which I
inhabit, and by you that made me" (p. 147); and again, "'I swear,'
he cried, 'by the sun, and by the blue sky of Heaven, and by the
fire of love that burns my heart' " (p. 148).

The only other evidences to support the monster's claim to
benevolence are its first actions, when it argues, it had not
yet been corrupted by ill usage at the hands of human beings.
But here Mary Shelley is
careful to keep this evidence from revealing anything certain
about the monster:

He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they
may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened and he
muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his
cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was
stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed
down stairs. (p. 58)

The description is quite ambiguous, and the rest of the novel's
action pivots on the crisis of Frankenstein's reading of that
ambiguity. It is important to note, though, that Frankenstein
did not recognize an ambiguity in the monster's actions.
Awakened from a troubled sleep to find a horrible thing looming
over him, he reacted on impulse and escaped. Only afterwards is
he told by the monster that he was wrong, that it had not meant
him wrong.

Finally, the monster appeals for absolute belief: "Believe me
Frankenstein" (p. 100). The
drama this creates carries religious overtones. Can
Frankenstein lay aside all the seeming evidence of his senses
and embrace pure belief, giving himself up to the monster's
word? But Mary Shelley gives this a vital twist, a turning of
the screw: the question is not really whether Frankenstein can
do so, but whether he should do so. It may be that the monster
is the saviorlike figure Frankenstein intended to create; but it
is equally possible, so far as Frankenstein knows, that the
monster is a fiend. Frankenstein does know, after all, that the
monster can destroy men. He has only its word that, granted its
desires, it will not do so. Frankenstein is trapped in a crisis
of decision: by denying the monster, Frankenstein has supposedly
created its destructive acts, and further denial will result in
further destruction; but if he {54} accepts the monster's word
and creates a mate for it, may he not be thereby simply
multiplying the monster's destructive power? Or, if not that,
perhaps this monster-mate will itself become independent and
begin wreaking destruction on its own: "I was now about to form
another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she
might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate"
(p. 165). The key words
here are "ignorant" and "might." How is Frankenstein to know
how to act?

The focus of Frankenstein is on this problem of knowing.
As Frankenstein muses at one point in his youthful scientific
studies, "It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be
known" (p. 41). The question
is not the truth or falsity of things in themselves. The
monster may be benevolent, just as it says it is. The question
is whether human consciousness can recognize that truth or
falsity. Mary Shelley is concerned with whether man can judge
rightly, and more important whether he can know he has judged
rightly.

It is significant that she makes her reader as well as her
novel's characters face this question. By structuring the novel
as she does, with Walton's tale, in the form of a series of
letters to his sister, framing the tales of Frankenstein and the
monster, Mary Shelley
draws the reader into the novel's world. In effect, the reader
becomes Walton's sister reading the letters. Thus, entering the
drama, the reader is encouraged to leave behind his own world of
known truths and falsehoods and to experience the world as the
novel's characters experience it. He witnesses the characters
determining how to act, confronting the consequences of their
decisions, seeking to defend or attack the justice of those
decisions. He is made privy both to the conflicting claims to
truth and justice and to the evidence offered in their support.
And because of this, he is made to see not only that the
conflicting claims to justice are not resolved, but that they
cannot be resolved in terms of the evidence and experience given
in the novel.

The monster always claims it is worthy of trust and that its
treatment has been unjust: "I, the miserable and the abandoned.
am an abortion, to be spumed at, and kicked, and trampled on.
Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice"
(p. 222). Frankenstein at
one point wavers, moved by the monster's eloquent pleading for a
mate: "I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible
consequences of my consent; but I felt that there was some
justice in his argument" (p.
146). But his terrible doubts about those "possible
consequences" and his glimpse of the monster's "ghastly grin" as
it peers in a window at him as he works are enough, finally, to
convince him the monster cannot be trusted; and then to the end
he claims, "I feel myself justified in desiring the death of my
adversary" (p. 217). The
problem of rendering judgment falls to Walton. The dying
Frankenstein attempts to pass on to Walton his quest for the
monster's destruction; but at the last moment he admits that
Walton had best think the {55} evidence through for himself:
"But the consideration of these points, and the well balancing
of what you may esteem your duties, I leave to you; my judgment
and ideas are already disturbed by the near approach of death"
(p. 217). Walton then
listens to the monster's argument and is for a moment moved,
just as Frankenstein had been. But then, remembering
Frankenstein's warning about the monster's powers of persuasion,
he too rejects the monster. Now right judgment is in question
with Walton himself. Like Frankenstein, he is caught up in a
dubious quest, and so he thinks of Frankenstein as his friend.
Hence, his decision to trust Frankenstein rather than the
monster. But the important point here is that Walton has no
more solid grounds for deciding than Frankenstein himself did.
The reader recognizes this because, involved in the drama, he
himself knows as much of the evidence as the characters do and
no more than they do.

This is why it is important to keep accurately in mind just how
the noveI ends. Walton lets the monster go without asking
himself, as Frankenstein would have, whether the monster speaks
truly -- whether in fact it will carry out its Phoenix-like
suicide or whether it merely seeks to escape pursuit, now that
its chance to secure a mate is lost. In the novel's final
phrase, the monster loses itself "in darkness and distance," and
in these words can be traced also the loss of any chance to
encounter some solid, unambiguous or unchallenged evidence of
the monster's true nature.

By means of multiple first-person narration, the balancing of
unresolved conflicting claims to truth and justice, and
ambiguous primary evidence, Mary Shelley prevents the
reader from knowing the monster. By so doing, I believe, she
heightens her novel's significance, transforming it from a
fairly simple moral tract into something approaching tragedy.
If we ourselves knew that the monster were true and benevolent,
Frankenstein would tend to become what some readers have
tried to make it, a "moral fable."5 Our sense of moral judgment
generated by this would focus, I suppose, upon one of two
quantities. We might see the novel as a condemnation of advanced
or extreme scientific speculation in general, which is, in fact,
what the Frankenstein-myth has come to mean to the popular
mind. Or we might condemn Frankenstein's peculiar moral
weaknesses, for example, his "moral error, his failure to
love."6 But
Mary Shelley makes it very hard to fix upon an easy object of
condemnation. Shelley himself warns the reader in the Preface he wrote to his
wife's novel: ". . . nor is any inference justly to be
drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical
doctrine of whatever kind" (p.
14).7 It
{56} is a mark of the novel's maturity that its terrible events
cannot be made to yield easy precepts.

.
It is worth noting that the novel's particular kind of tragic
vision is one proper for the concerns of the Romantic period. The
tragedy is not grounded in tension between opposing moral
obligations or in tension between moral obligation and desire;
it arises out of tension between opposing claims about what is
true. This fact offers a means of placing Mary Shelley's novel
in the literary context of the Romantic period.

II

Frankenstein's monster belongs to a family of strange creatures
often encountered in Romantic literature. Like
Blake's Tyger, Shelley'sAlastor, and Keats's Belle Dame. But it is
also akin to other humanlike creatures in the literature Wordsworth's Idiot Boy or his
Old Soldier in Book IV of The Prelude. Coleridge'sMariner and Keats's Porphyro
of "The Eve of St. Agnes." Consider Wordsworth's description of
his encounter with the Old Soldier:

All else was still;
No living thing appeared in earth or air,
And save the flowing water's peaceful voice,
Sound there was none -- but lo! an uncouth shape,
Shown by a sudden turning of the road
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . He was of stature tall,
A span above man's common measure, tall,
Stiff, lank, and upright; a more meagre man
Was never seen before by night or day.
Long were his arms, pallid his hands; his mouth
Looked ghastly in the moonlight.

(Prelude, IV, 384-396; 1850 version)

This could be a verse introduction to Frankenstein's monster,
but for the reference to "man." Wordsworth gives us here a
character who at first seems monstrous but who later proves most
human, generating a mixed reaction of awe and pity. With
Porphyro in "The Eve of St. Agnes," Keats reverses the pattern.
There we find a figure who, at first, seems to fit common human
categories of admiration. Porphyro is the young lover, Romeo on
quest: "Meantime, across the moors, / Had come young Porphyro,
with heart on fire / For Madeline" (11. 74-76). But as the poem
develops and the mythic-religious suggestions become insistent,
we are made to wonder whether Porphyro is what he appears to
be: "Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream / Alone
with her good angels, far apart / From wicked men like thee.
Go,. go! -- I deem / Thou canst not surely be the same that thou
didst seem" {57} ll. 141-144).8 And at the end he takes Madeline
out into an "elfin-storm."

What, despite their differences, unites all these figures is that
they are what we may call Strangers. They come from outside the
bounds of man's ordinary experience; and like Porphyro entering
the castle from the moors, they impinge upon the structure of
common human concerns, values, ways of thinking and doing, and
present a challenge to its adequacy and/or validity. The
Stranger appears, bearing what may be either temptation or
salvation, challenging the human mind either to reject its
accustomed structures in favor of contrary ones or to embrace the
contraries and so form a new, enlarged mental world.

The fundamental question posed by the Stranger concerns the
human mind's ability to know things. A thing may not be what it
seems to be; in fact, it may be quite the opposite of what it
seems to be. From an earlier world, we have a poem like George
Herbert's "The Collar," for example, in which the mere
"Methought I heard one calling, Child!" is sufficient to
produce the acquiescing, "And I replied, My Lord." But in
the Romantics' world,
the mind asks first whether Voices crying "Child!" can be
trusted.

The Romantics' fascination with the Stranger-figure is a
function of their basic concern with the problem of knowledge.
The young Keats musing to his
friend Bailey is a familiar illustration: "I have never yet been
able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by
consequitive reasoning -- and yet it must be -- Can it be that
even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his goal without
putting aside numerous objections[?]"9 The problem is that if these
"objections" are not laid aside, they seem to generate
irresolvable problems such as Wordsworth encountered when
he tried to sort out the tangled moral questions posed by the French Revolution and a Godwinian rationalism:
"Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds / Like
culprits to the bar," he succeeded only in becoming "Sick,
wearied out with contrarieties" and "Yielded up moral questions
in despair" (Prelude, XI, 293-305; 1850 version). As Blake writes in the first
"Memorable Fancy" of his Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
"How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an
immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?" What
troubles the Romantics is their recognition that the traditional
grounds of Knowledge are far from certain. Thus they repeatedly
present the Stranger, {58} reminding us, first, that we may not
really know what we think we know, and, second, that things may
therefore be the opposite of what they seem.

This generalization demands modification, of course, when we
begin thinking about particular Romantic writers, though
here we have to speak about tendencies in their thinking rather
than fixed positions, since their works chronicle a struggle
toward stable convictions rather than an unfolding of
preexistent systems of belief.

The first generation of Romantics tends to hold not simply that
things may be the opposite of what they seem but that they are
so, and that this reality is ultimately discoverable by the
human mind. This is especially true of their earlier writings,
and the belief is intimately related to their revolutionary
sympathies in politics.
Men have been deluded: what they have been persuaded or have
persuaded themselves to consider good is actually evil;
important, unimportant; true, false -- and vice versa. Thus the
drama of their Strangers is commonly a movement from the
apparently negative (to use the broadest possible term) to a
revelation of the actually positive. Thus we have Wordsworth's
transvaluations of the Idiot Boy and of his various figures from
the yeoman and beggar classes, Coleridge's of the
Nightingale and the Young Ass, Blake's inversions of Angels and
Devils.

The second-generation Romantics flirt with the notion of
experience as a test of validity. One remembers, for example,
Keats's statement that
"axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon
our pulses."10 But this generation is, on the
whole, much more skeptical about what can be learned from
experience. It tends to think that things may not be, in fact
probably are not, what they seem; but human beings cannot
experience enough or see deeply enough to know what in fact they
really are. Thus, if the first generation of Romantics tends to
seek out how much can be known in spite of epistemological
problems, the second generation tends to emphasize how much man
cannot know.11Byron is the great and obvious
example here. Shelley
asserts in "Lift Not the Painted Veil" that peering behind the
veil of what "those who live / Call life" reveals not the true
nature of things but only "Fear / And Hope, twin Destinies; who
ever weave / Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and
drear." The persona describes "a Spirit that strove / For truth,
and like the Preacher found it not." In Prometheus Unbound
Demogorgon tells Asia that "the deep truth is imageless" (Act II, iv, 116). In the
final lines of "Mont
Blanc," conceived in the same summer as Frankenstein,
Shelley musingly addresses the mountain, "And what were thou,
and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind's
imaginings / {59} Silence and solitude were vacancy?" (ll. 142-144). We are
very close to Frankenstein here, with its monster's
insistence to Frankenstein that "the human senses are
insurmountable barriers to our union" (p. 145).

It would appear, however, that Keats is closer to Mary Shelley's interests in
Frankenstein. He is fond of the pattern we find in
Frankenstein, encounters between different kinds of
consciousnesses. While Keats writes poems of the mind's
encounter with an Urn or a Nightingale, he also traces the
meetings between the mind and a Belle Dame, a Porphyro, and a
Lamia. These Strangers appear and lead the mind into new realms
of thought and action: the Knight-at-Arms lifts La Belle Dame to
his horse and "nothing else saw all day long"; Porphyro leads
Madeline from her northern castle on a journey, so he tells her,
to a home in the south; Lycius rejects his scholars' company for
the enchanted palace of sensuous life with Lamia. The pattern
of reversal seems almost Blakean, but Keats keeps us from
knowing whether this inversion is a movement from negative to
positive or the reverse.

To achieve this suspension of knowledge, Keats uses some of the same
devices we encounter in Frankenstein: description of
action that may be interpreted in contradictory ways (La Belle
Dame "look'd at me as she did love"); conflicting assertions
about the Stranger's intentions (Angela's accusation, "A cruel
man and impious thou art" [1. 140], set off against Porphyro's
oath, "I will not harm her, by all saints I swear" [1.145], and
his later plea for trust to Madeline, ". . . if thou
think'st well / To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel"
[11. 341-342]); and basic questions about the Stranger's true
nature (Lamia's statement that she "was a woman" and would have
"once more / A woman's shape" [11. 117-118] leaves us uncertain
whether she remains essentially a serpent hidden by woman's
form, and this uncertainty becomes the poem's dominant tension
because of the conflicting positions taken by the poem's
narrator, by Lycius, and by Apollonius). Then, having generated
these tensions, Keats preserves rather than resolves them. In
"La Belle Dame" and "Lamia" he accomplishes this by aborting the
relationship between the Stranger and human consciousness
through the intrusions of the Knight's dream and Apollonius's
killing accusation; by so doing, he causes the curtain to fall
on the action without letting us see what evil result, if any,
would have been born from that relationship. In "St. Agnes"
Porphyro successfully persuades Madeline to trust him, and then
he disappears with her into the storm; this leaves us to
recognize that what we have witnessed may be either an elaborate
seduction or a salvation, and that our chance to discover which
lies lost in the storm Porphyro leads Madeline into. Is that
storm what Porphyro says it is, "an elfin-storm from faery land,
/ Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed" (11. 343-344), or is
it only a "boon indeed" for the fulfillment of Porphyro's
uncertain intentions? Madeline trusts Porphyro, having been
persuaded by his eloquence; but the reader is made to recognize
that one cannot know whether Porphyro ought to be trusted or
not.

{60} In this, we have a mirror-image of Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein. Frankenstein does not trust the monster,
refusing to be persuaded by his eloquence; but the reader is
made to recognize that one cannot know but what the monster
ought to have been trusted. The answer lies hidden in the
monster's loss "in darkness and distance," which parallels the
covering storm of Keats's poem. As with Porphyro and other
typical second-generation Romantic Strangers, the monster's true
nature is never revealed. Although the mind experiences the
monster to the extent of hearing its speech, seeing its
appearance, and observing at least some of its actions, this
experiencing is not sufficient to yield knowledge. In fact,
experience serves to render more complex the question of the
monster's nature and to confuse the attempt to decide whether
the creature can be trusted. Like other Romantics of her
generation, Mary Shelley shows that experience may multiply
rather than answer questions.

A number of qualities, however, distinguish Frankenstein
from many of the other works we have mentioned, and these
qualities give the novel a claim to special attention. Mary
Shelley intensifies the drama of human consciousness created by
the Stranger by placing it in a context of extreme and broadly
inclusive consequences. In Frankenstein, the question is
no longer a limited one of personal consequences, as it is with
Keats's Madeline. Instead,
Frankenstein's and later Walton's response to the monster's
pleas have potential life-and-death significance for all men.
Frankenstein himself comes to recognize this terrible burden,
and it contributes both to the agony of his doubt and, finally,
to his claim that he was justified in denying the monster: "My
duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims
to my attention, because they included a greater proportion of
happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did
right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature"
(p. 217).

In addition to intensifying the potential consequences of
decision, Mary Shelley also immeasurably complicates the problem
of deciding. She does this by introducing the concept of
process or Becoming into the decision- making process. When one
asks about the true nature of a Stranger, one is looking for the
fixed, essential Being of the creature. We may be mistaken
about what the Tyger is or what Porphyro is, but we are never
encouraged to consider that these creatures may not remain
static throughout our struggles to know them. But in
Frankenstein Being yields to Becoming, "is" yields to
"was," "is at the moment," and "will be"; and the attempt to
know the Stranger's true nature becomes finally an attempt to
know what the creature will be in the future, and whether it
will remain that way. The monster admits that it is now
fiendish and not the benevolent, gentle creature it once was; it
insists that it will be benevolent and good again. The effect
of this is to render inconclusive all potential evidence in time
present and to force the mind to confront the infinite and
changing possibilities of what might be in time future. {61}
Frankenstein thus worries that his second creation "might
become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate" (p.
165: italics mine).

Further, there is the key factor of Frankenstein's doubt. Mary
Shelley's novel is a study of the mind in the process of trying
to come to terms with the Stranger. Frankenstein rejects the
monster, then accepts it, then rejects it again; and we are made
privy to his mind's struggle. Frankenstein is a drama of
man's mind struggling with the awareness that the Stranger is a
stranger and yet being forced, nevertheless, to deal with it as
if it were a known quantity.

Finally, and most important, Frankenstein is distinct in
that here the human mind does not merely encounter the Stranger;
instead it creates it.

III

I think the effect of Frankenstein is to suggest that man
is caught up in a vicious dilemma of mutually undesirable
alternatives. Frankenstein creates his monster, so encounters
the Stranger through his own efforts instead of simply coming
upon it by accident or meeting it as a result of the Stranger's
own mysterious designs. The Stranger, then, need not be
encountered. The novel shows us what happens to those who do
pursue the Stranger (Frankenstein who sets to work in his
laboratory and Walton who sets out in his ship) and also what
happens to those who do not. Neither alternative is
pleasant.

Frankenstein's fiancée, Elizabeth, functions as a link
between Frankenstein and Walton, who pursue the Stranger, and
the rest of the novel's characters who do not. At one point in
the novel, Elizabeth stumbles upon the notion that leads to the
Stranger, when she struggles to explain why she "knows" the
executed Justine (note Mary Shelley's pun) was innocent of
William's murder:

But she was innocent. I know, I feel she was innocent; you are
of the same opinion, and that confirms me. Alas! Victor,
when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure
themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on
the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding
and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss. (p. 93; italics mine)

Elizabeth glimpses the "abyss" in her perception that truth and
falsehood may look alike. But significantly. she draws back
from it, refusing to take the next and fatal step of trying to
discover whether seeming truths are in fact falsehoods and vice
versa. Instead, seeking a solid ground, she moves from the
assertion of Justine's innocence (I know it) to a tentative. but
inadequate support (I feel it) to an ultimate confirmation in
the fact that Frankenstein shares her "opinion."

By clinging to shared opinion and calling it truth, Elizabeth
retreats from Frankenstein's and Walton's determination to find
out what is really true through direct experience in the
objective world beyond the individual {62} consciousness. Thus
she falls back to the attitude toward knowledge that
Frankenstein's friend Clerval represents in the novel. Clerval
is also, in a sense, a seeker after knowledge: "Clerval occupied
himself, so to speak, with the moral relations of things" (p. 38). But this leads Clerval to
pursue, not the nature of things Out There beyond the mind, but
rather the creations of the mind itself, expressing what men
think and have thought about the world. The young Clerval
studies literature instead of science, and later at the
university he studies languages. Significantly, when Clerval and
Frankenstein visit London,
Frankenstein busies himself collecting information necessary to
create the monster's mate, but Clerval "desired the intercourse
of the men of genius and talent who flourished at this time" (p.
157). There is irony here,
because, unknown to Clerval, his own friend Frankenstein is one
of these men of genius and talent. But this is Mary Shelley's point.
Clerval's occupation with what the human mind thinks does not
extend to questioning whether the mind's thoughts conform to what
lies outside the mind. Thus Clerval, like Elizabeth (once she
chooses opinion), can believe that he knows things. He can
console Frankenstein after William's death: "The pang is over,
his sufferings are at an end for ever. A sod covers his gentle
form, and he knows no pain" (p. 74). Mary Shelley reminds us of
the fragility of Clerval's assurance here by later having the
monster, contemplating its proposed suicide, echo Clerval's
consolation with an important qualification: "My spirit will
sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think
thus" (p. 223; italics mine).
Clerval is really a believer rather than a seeker after
knowledge. But because of this, Clerval remains stable and happy
-- until, of course, he is destroyed by the monster, a mystery of
that objective world he has not taken into account in his
studies.

The dilemma, then, seems to me to be this. The human mind can
ignore the unsettling question of whether its thoughts conform
to the nature of things. This question does not seem to occur
to most men, not even to amateur scholars like Clerval. But if,
as in Elizabeth's case, the question does occur, the mind can
step back from the abyss it reveals by choosing to embrace the
apparent safety of shared opinion. Thus man can preserve for
himself a certain amount of happiness and stability. However,
this safety is fragile: the monster destroys Innocents; William,
Justine, and Elizabeth as well as Clerval fall prey to it.
Thus, not only does the Innocent accept as necessary those
burdens of his life that are customary but that may not be for
that reason necessary, but he also renders himself helpless to
guard against the results of other men's refusal to accept those
burdens. Elizabeth's and Clerval's relationships to
Frankenstein exhibit a sort of inverse parallel to
Frankenstein's relationship to the monster. They both think
they know Frankenstein: trusting him instead of becoming
suspicious of his peculiar behavior, they do not seek to
discover what accounts for it. Helpless in their lack of
knowledge, they die without knowing what hit them.

{63} However, the alternative is equally or more disturbing.
Walton functions in the novel to dissolve the particularity of
Frankenstein's quest, showing that Mary Shelley's focus is not
on the particular object quested for but rather on the kind of
thinking that generates the questing, which Frankenstein and
Walton share. Once it occurs to the mind that A might actually
be Z (that instead of real bounds, life and death might be only
"ideal bounds," as Frankenstein puts it [p. 54], or that the Pole might
actually be delight rather than desolation, as Walton thinks),
then the mind can act upon that notion and try to find out. It
can leave the realm of traditional beliefs and shared opinion and
try to enter the realm of certain knowledge. But that knowledge
leads to a world of nightmare and death.

In tracing Frankenstein's and Walton's quests, Mary Shelley
presents a modern version of the myth of transgression, offering
a philosophically comprehensible reading of the mythic narrative
of what results from sinning against the god-figure. Both Frankenstein
and Walton are Prometheans striking out
against Jupiter (things as man thinks they are, traditional and
accepted structures of belief); they are also mankind presuming
to reach out and grasp the fruit of the Tree. The problem Mary
Shelley confronts here is the difficult one her husband Percy Shelley faced later
in Prometheus Unbound: given a modern intellectual's
world view that lacks the notion of an anthropomorphic God, how
are we to understand the mythic concepts of a Jupiter chaining
Prometheus or a God driving man from Eden as punishment for
transgression? Her solution, like her husband's, is to create a
purely mental drama of damnation, though the drama itself is
quite different from her husband's. Mary Shelley seeks to show
through Frankenstein and Walton that the mind's dangerous
attempt to reach out beyond established boundaries may result in
a sort of mental suicide. Seeking to escape the chains of mere
belief, the mind can fall into an abyss in which it is incapable
of functioning effectively. Those whom the gods wish to
destroy, they first make mad.

In creating the monster, Frankenstein unwittingly exposes
himself to the essential unknowableness of things; he discovers
the human mind's inability to deduce truths about the essential
nature of things from phenomenal data. The narrative of his
attempt to deal with the monster chronicles the erosion of the
mind's grounds for knowing things. First, Frankenstein flees
from a horrible sensory experience; but the monster's eloquent
argument creates doubt, suggesting to him that a horrible
appearance may not indicate a horrible essential nature. Then
in turn Frankenstein realizes that eloquent argument may not
indicate an honest nature. Further, he comes to realize that
what a thing is or seems to be at the present moment may not
indicate what it will become in the future: Frankenstein himself
experiences an abrupt and unexpected inversion of behavior from
controlled purposefulness to helpless terror at the moment the
monster first opens its eyes; and the monster insists {64} that
what it was, is, and will be are different things. And then
finally, in his last words to Walton, Frankenstein stumbles upon
that ultimate perception destructive of the mind's ability to
know. Having just advised Walton to "Seek happiness in
tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the
apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science
and discoveries," another possibility flashes into his mind:
"Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these
hopes, yet another may succeed" (pp. 217-218). These are
Frankenstein's last words, asserting still untarnished
possibility in the face of the negative example of his own
experience.

Frankenstein's key word is "may." By degrees he comes to
recognize that the ground most men stand on when they think is
not solid at all, and so we find him crying near the novel's
close, "'Man,' I cried, 'how ignorant art thou in thy pride of
wisdom! Cease; you know not what it is you say' " (p. 201). The comfortable Is of the
mind's supposed knowledge becomes in Frankenstein's experience
May Be: no piece of evidence conclusively confirms or denies
possibility. In one of the many fine touches in
Frankenstein, Mary
Shelley foreshadows this point in the opening paragraphs.
Walton, ecstatic over his notion that the Pole may be other than
what men think, exclaims, "What may not be expected in a country
of eternal light?" (p. 16).
Once man's mind bathes in "light," it realizes that, so far as
it knows, anything may be true, but all things are not true.

The effect of this realization is a sort of frenzy, almost a
religious fanaticism. The mind becomes cut off from or, better,
cuts itself off from all checks or deterrents from the world of
phenomenal data because those data are inconclusive. If a given
A might be Z, then might not all A's be Z's? Once the mind
reaches this state and fixes upon some notion, no contrary datum
can alter that fixation. We see this beginning to happen to
Walton in the novel. He pushes on toward the Pole in spite of
the ice that threatens to destroy him and his crew; and, forced
to turn back, he returns, as he says,"ignorant and
disappointed. It requires more philosophy than I possess, to
bear this injustice with patience" (p. 215).12 Walton begins to argue over
justice, mirroring Frankenstein's quarrels with the monster.
Frankenstein, having actually touched and struggled with his
quest, is further along the path of {65} mental destruction than
Walton. He comes to conceive of himself as paralleling one of
the "martyrs of old" (p. 200)
and as possessing a "task enjoined by heaven" (p. 204). Appropriately enough: as
a young man, to see a tree struck by lightning had been
sufficient to change "the current" of Frankenstein's ideas (p.
40), but by the novel's
concluding section Frankenstein has, significantly, "departed
from land" (p. 206) on his
fanatical quest for the monster's destruction. Once determined,
no earthly voices can deter him from his mind's resolution. He
is, in other words, a Prometheus who, setting out
to free himself from enslavement to the mind's ideas, becomes
bound to the rock of his own mind's ideas.

Notes

1 I have used the Oxford English Novels edition
of Frankenstein, ed. with an introduction by M. K. Joseph
(London, 1969); the quotations here are from p. 100, p. 115, and p. 99. Subsequent page references
are given in the text.

7 Muriel Spark, Child of Light
(Hadleigh, England, 1951), finds it "curious" that Shelley wrote this, and
then goes on to suggest it should not be taken seriously (p.
135). To the contrary, I think Shelley is being quite serious
here.

8 My thinking about "St. Agnes" owes something
to Jack Stillinger, "The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in
'The Eve of St. Agnes,'" SP, 58 (1961), 533-555. On the
Romantics' attitude
toward knowledge in general, it is helpful to consult the
following studies: Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of
Experience (New York, 1957); Christos E. Pulos, The Deep
Truth: A Study of Shelley's Skepticism (Lincoln, Neb.,
1954); Earl R. Wasserman, "The English Romantics: The Grounds of
Knowledge," SIR, 4 (1964), 17-34; and D. G. James,
Scepticism and Poetry (London, 1937).

11Coleridge is something of a
bridge between the generations. In the earlier poetry and then
later in the prose, he struggles toward certainty. But from "The Ancient Mariner" on,
his poetry reminds one more of the second generation, with its
emphasis on ambiguities and his fondness for words like
"seems."

12 "Moral and Myth in Mrs Shelley'sFrankenstein," K-SJ, 8 (l959), M. A. Goldberg
suggests that "Walton and Frankenstein both sin, not against
self or God, but against the
moral and social order. Though both begin their pursuit with
benevolent intentions, each discovers his error in assuming that
knowledge is a higher good than love or sympathy, and that it
can be independent of the fellow-feeling afforded by a
compassionate society" (p 33) This is not quite true. Early in
the novel, Frankenstein says something like this ("If the study
to which you apply yourself . . . " [p. 56]); but
toward the novel's end, he is urging Walton's sailors to push on
through the ice, and at the very end he decides someone else
might succeed at his own quest, even though he himself failed.
And Walton does not learn anything; he turns back in protest,
insisting he remains ignorant and wanting to go on. In other
word, we have here a chronicle of increasing fanaticism.